in my heart a garden grows
Tonight, I am becoming. Tonight I am a caterpillar tearing my old skin apart to let the new-me crawl free of my corpse.
But it is not a butterfly spreading her wings for the moon to bless. It is something far more terrible, far more lovely, far more twisted and beautiful and deadly and right, right, right.
But it is not a butterfly spreading her wings for the moon to bless. It is something far more terrible, far more lovely, far more twisted and beautiful and deadly and right, right, right.
It is not the jaw of a unicorn grinding leaves to pulp in her mouth, but a winter-hare. And it is not death she is swallowing down but life, life that makes her heart beat faster and turns her veins into roots that are burning as they dig through the soil of her body.
It is not the sickness she tastes.
It is the honey-sweet pollen coating her lips, her teeth, her tongue, crawling down her throat like spiders where they make webs of rotten leaves and vines in her belly. It is the promise waiting to slip between her ribs and find a home in the graveyard of her lungs.
And it is not a unicorn who rises to run through the veins of those mountain sheep. But she is running through the fairy rings of their eyes, and she is laughing with the voice of a rabbit, and a wolf, and a woodland monster when the creatures fall upon her in the center of it. They are dancing there, in the fairy ring-eyes of the ewes, pulling her along with them until she sinks deeper, and deeper, and deeper into them.
She looks down and sees blue ash making molehills and forests. She looks up and sees the insides of their eyes, blooming with larkspur and monkshood. The mountain valley is awash in the colors of their irises, like the fluid filling their eyes has spilled out into the world and she has been swept along on its current running down their cheeks.
You’re going mad they whisper to her, with their teeth drawing rivers of blood upon her skin that draw the rest of them to her like flies to a corpse. They claw at her, dig the spaces between her ribs deeper and deeper until she can feel them filling up her chest and gnawing at every organ rotting there.
And she only laughs all the louder, all the wilder. And when she turns to her sister and tries to ask her, “what is a unicorn if she is not a little mad?” all that comes out of her mouth is the barking scream of a fox.
So she screams. She screams and she screams until all those mountain sheep are running, and somewhere she knows her sister is running through the bellies of them. Somewhere she is aware that there are dandelion seeds carrying her sister’s wishes, and sorrows, and dreams through lungs like foxtails waiting to embed themselves into flesh.
But Isolt is dancing in their eyes with the fairies.
@danaë
"wilting // blooming"
